Saturday, January 30, 2010

A Big Thank You for the Feedback

Feedback is an essential force and of priceless value for many things you do in your daily life. It is one of the central elements of agile software development and it is absolutely priceless to get honest and constructive feedback for the work you do. Sometimes its hard to get this feedback, sometimes not. Some of you might know that I am part of the podcast team at Software Engineering Radio, a podcast for professional software developers that publishes a new episode every 14 days under a creative commons license. I don't do as much episodes as I wish, but regularly people write emails to the team saying "thank you for the great work" and telling us that they really like what we do. Now its time for me to say a big THANK YOU back to those guys. Especially this blog entry that I read today is really nice (many many thanks) and gives a lot of motivation!

Thank you!!!


Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Sessionfire is available as public beta

Some of you might know, Matthias and myself are working on a new kind of presentation tool, called Sessionfire. After a period of private alpha testing we are pretty happy that it has left this period just a few days ago and started its public beta stage. So everybody is invited to grab a copy of it and give it a try. Its not open source (maybe it will be some day in the future), but its free to download and free to use (as well as the next beta builds).

The current beta version has a quite limited set of features, so you don't get a replacement for your favorite presentation tool right away. We start with something small, far far away from being feature complete, move forward in small steps while always trying to do something useful in a gorgeous way. So you won't be able to create your presentation completely with Sessionfire at the moment, for example. But you can run your show with Sessionfire, using images, animations, timers, three-dimentional optics, reflections, visual fast-forward and -backward, different 3D-layoutings and some more stuff.

Try it! - Enjoy it!